1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for gathering user preference data. More specifically, the present invention relates to obtaining user preferences for query results by analyzing user interactions with a set of query results.
2. Related Art
The relentless growth of the Internet has been largely fueled by the development of sophisticated search engines, which enable users to comb through billions of web pages looking for specific pages of interest. Because a given query can return millions of search results it is important to be able to rank these search results to present the highest-quality results to the user.
It is extremely difficult if not impossible to measure the quality of results directly. Early techniques for ranking results considered intrinsic properties of each candidate result document, including how recently the document was updated, and/or how close the search terms are to the beginning of the document. Another technique considers an extrinsic property, the back-links for linked documents. However, these techniques are based on properties that are under authorial control, and do not necessarily indicate the direct preferences of users. It is desirable to obtain a more direct measurement of search result quality from users themselves. However, it is difficult to obtain such measurements from users.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for accurately ranking search results based on user preferences,